Many businesses, particularly financial institutions, are dependent upon timely reception of information from government agencies (e.g., unemployment statistics) and from press release services reporting information and announcements concerning publicly traded companies (e.g., earnings reports, merger offers and possibilities, etc.). In many instances involving the distribution of material or sensitive information (e.g., information that may have an impact on the economy, markets, or a company's financial outlook/status), if one intended recipient receives the disclosed information even a relatively short time before another, then the one recipient may gain an unfair advantage (e.g., a financial advantage) over the other intended recipient(s) of the information. In such cases, information distribution services may desire or be required to guarantee “simultaneous disclosure” of the information (e.g., a press release or other form of communication) to all or a subset of the intended recipients.
“Simultaneous disclosure” as used herein includes the distribution of information in a ‘bias free’ manner (i.e., distribution which “plays no favorites”) and wherein the disclosed information is received by all of the intended recipients within a ‘tight time tolerance’ (i.e., the intended recipients receive the information at substantially the same time within a small acceptable tolerance which may be predetermined based on the nature of the underlying information). The term “simultaneous disclosure” is not strictly limited to distribution of press releases, but may apply to any sensitive and actionable content, or any content announcing availability of limited resources, such as an announcement of an organization accepting applications for a job opening in which it is expected there will be many more applicants than available job openings, or an announcement of ticket availability for an event which is likely to be oversubscribed. Other applications include distributing general information in which the time allowed to prepare a response is limited (e.g. RFP's for competitive contracts) or announcing that the time to perform a particular action has commenced, and that actions will be judged or rewarded on a “first-come, first-serve” basis.
In August of 2000, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) promulgated Regulation Fair Disclosure (herein referred to as “Reg. FD”) designed to prevent selective disclosure by public companies to market professionals and certain shareholders. To effectuate this purpose, Reg. FD requires “[w]henever an issuer . . . discloses any material nonpublic information regarding that issuer or its securities . . . the issuer shall make public disclosure of that information . . . simultaneously, in the case of an intentional disclosure.” In this regard, Reg. FD is often referred to as the “simultaneous disclosure” rule.
Conventional methods and systems have been developed in order to achieve ‘simultaneous disclosure’ as required by Reg. FD or otherwise. For example, the release of government statistics, such as unemployment data, the U.S. government instituted a technique referred to as the “lock up” approach, wherein individuals with press credentials were brought into a “lock up room”, presented with the information to be released, and given access to terminals (e.g., laptop computers) that each could be used to transmit the information at a specific time but with the transmission capability temporarily deactivated. Then, at the specific time of release (e.g., exactly 8:30 AM EST), a central switch controlling all terminals is then used to activate the transmission capability of each terminal all at once, permitting the information to be transmitted from each terminal to the journalists' offices, presumably at the same time. However, this approach has the drawback that not all computer equipment for transmitting the information has the same engineering such that the information is actually transmitted at the same time. Moreover, this approach requires an increase in expensive equipment and room for the system as the number of individuals increases.
Another conventional method for providing “simultaneous disclosure” is via satellite communication. Satellite transmission of information or data has the advantage of being at such a high altitude that bits appear to “rain down” so that anyone who wishes to receive satellite data receives it essentially at the same time. For this reason, the business community largely adopted this form of communication by the mid-1970s. For example, the PR (press release) wire services began using satellites to build full domestic networks in the United States capable of sending financial information quickly to media outlets all over the country. As the PR wire services became the accepted and trusted information disseminator for corporations, the PR wire services took on the additional role as the official provider of “disclosure” for public corporations.
Demand for corporate information continues to grow as news and investment firms compete for the public's attention. Therefore, the role of the PR wire services expanded to provide fast, electronic, and ‘simultaneous’ disclosure of certain disclosures and press release information. Satellite technology emerged as the primary method for simultaneously broadcasting the news and other information to the various media, investment, and research communities.
However, significant problems with using satellite technology for this purpose also emerged. Because satellite transmissions to normal recipients lacking high-powered uplinks are one-way broadcasts, there is no means to confirm that a transmission was successful. Therefore, wire service transmissions are sent out “blind,” having no verification message coming back from the media point to validate receipt of a communication. Several methods have been employed to try to overcome this lack of two-way communications, and therefore lack of an acknowledgement back channel (e.g., Forward Error Control, a separate terrestrial line for the acknowledgement channel), but all such methods lead to inefficiencies and higher costs of communication.
There were other cost considerations with regards to satellites. For many years, satellite distribution was lower in cost than terrestrial lines. However, with the increasing presence of mobile devices, demand for satellite bandwidth (because it is wireless and a good match for mobile applications) increased to the point that users have been forced to pay a large premium to use satellites. Therefore, transmission and reception of time-sensitive information having disclosure requirements has become increasingly and prohibitively expensive over satellites.
Introduction of the public Internet in the mid-1990's provided a new communications medium for the dissemination of news to the media community. As the Internet matured in the late 1990's, certain advantages over satellite technology became apparent, such as cheaper installation, widespread availability, high-speed, and full-duplex, two-way communication. Accordingly, Internet technology became the preferred alternative due to its faster, cheaper, global-reaching, and bi-directional characteristics.
However, the Internet has a major flaw that prohibits it from being accepted “as-is” as a viable communication vehicle for the dissemination of time-sensitive or Reg. FD-compliant information. The Internet's multi-point packet forwarded architecture does not ensure that information will reach multiple destinations/recipients in a fair and simultaneous fashion. As such, there was a need for the ability to provide near simultaneous delivery of information over any packet routed network, the public Internet in particular.
Existing protocols for simultaneous disclosure of electronic documents—described both in the open literature and in existing U.S. patents, such as, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,245 (hereinafter, the '245 patent), which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety—rely on encryption and essentially flow from the fundamental work on time-lock cryptography first announced on USENET by Timothy May in 1994. These techniques use a form of “lock up,” (i.e., an exact digital analog to the aforementioned physical “lock up” used to guarantee simultaneous disclosure of U.S. government data). According to this approach, the entire compilation of information (e.g., the electronic document) is transmitted to all recipients in an encrypted form. The entire encrypted text is received by each recipient and stored on each recipient's local computer in advance of a pre-set release time, for example 10 A.M. EST. Next, at precisely the pre-set time (i.e., 10 A.M. EST in this example), the decryption (“un-lock”) key is sent to each recipient. Since decryption keys are small enough to fit in a single packet, transmission of the key alone requires very little bandwidth. As such, any difference in arrival times due to Internet transmission speed and quality are assumed to be negligible, since those differences do not accumulate over multiple packets, as they would if an entire electronic document were transmitted.
Unfortunately, such encryption techniques fail the bias-free test, and the difference in arrival time is not truly negligible, since the owner of the fastest Internet connection always receives the key first. Furthermore, with encryption-based methods, a security break in the encryption used to safeguard the disclosed information results in the premature release of the information. It also appears that the encryption techniques used for simultaneous disclosure also suffer in theory from an additional serious flaw in that they use a single key for all the electronic documents (e.g., press releases) that are released in a given minute, and send the “key-for-that-minute”once, in one packet. This approach exposes such techniques to a “known plaintext attack.” In a “known plaintext attack,” the perpetrator “Blackhat” conspires with a number of companies to send out press releases scheduled for release in the same minute as the release Blackhat wishes to break. This guarantees that Blackhat will have access to plain-text/cipher-text pairs of messages all encrypted with the same key that Blackhat wishes to discover, in advance of the release minute. Powerful techniques exist to help Blackhat find the key given this type of data, which is usually not, and should not, be available.
A system which implements simultaneous reception of impactful information for a plurality of documents by a set of intended recipients may be implemented via a “push” network. As used herein, a “push” network presents information to a user without the user requesting the information.
Push networks implement “push services.” A push service copies and distributes, to a plurality of user terminals, a packet sent by an information providing process, wherein the information providing process may transfer packets at a regular interval or at a prescribed time without knowing the state of the individual user terminals. Users can operate their user terminals whenever they wish and may extract the information that has been distributed. Since a push network is defined in advance, if it were built on top of fixed, dedicated lines, then the “equality of network connection speed” could be controlled or at least catered for. But if the push network is layered “virtually” on top of the public Internet, then the speed and latency of the network connection to each would-be recipient cannot be controlled.
Alternatively, a system which implements simultaneous reception of impactful information for a set of documents by a plurality of intended recipients may be implemented via a “pull” network. As used herein, a “pull” network presents information to a user after the user requests the information. In effect, the network is “polled” by the user. Typically the user may have an account with the system with a login and password. After the user logs in, the user makes a request for the information and expects to receive the information either immediately or at a specified time.
An example of a pull network may include a user computer connected to the public Internet, wherein the user makes a request for content from their Web browser which forwards the request over the Internet to a Web server via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Simple Web servers handle requests sequentially, i.e., requests are received in a certain non-predetermined order, and then content is processed and sent to the recipients in the same order. Many modern Web servers use threads to process at least some of the requests that arrive approximately at the same time substantially simultaneously, but the time of delivery may vary based on connection speed, the server load, and the random order of the request arrivals, even if the requests are initiated by users at the same time.
When a press release is to be released via a Web server, by displaying it on a Web page, at a known time, thousands or even tens of thousands of users may use their Web browsers to request the document at the same time. A user with access to many computers or Web browsers may send many multiple requests, which would increase to near certainty the likelihood that at least one of that user's requests will be in a higher percentile of the requests to be processed first. This common practice gives motivated users an advantage over others with regard to access to content, thereby violating “Reg. FD”. In fact, motivated users could write or employ off-the-shelf automated software to create multiple robotic “users”, and deploy an entire army of robots to request the Web page. While there are Web server mechanisms to prevent access from robots, these mechanisms might make simultaneous disclosure worse by requiring further human interaction, thereby leading to even further lack of access-time consistency across all of the users. Worse, turning back an army of robots does nothing to defeat an army of real human users who are colluding to access the Web page before other users. Well-financed organizations could employ “crowd sourcing”, marshalling thousands of individuals, potentially across many countries, to request the Web page. If an organization coordinates 1,000 users requesting the Web page at the moment it is available, the odds are significantly increased that the organization obtains one copy of the Web page before other users, and therefore the information that is supposed to be simultaneously disclosed is received before many of the other users. Furthermore, users with fast Internet connections may receive a document faster than those with slower connections, even if the slower connection is processed first by a Web server.
In the same manner, documents requested via the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and other document transfer protocols have the same shortcomings and are likely to violate of “Reg. FD” under circumstances similar to Web servers employing HTTP.
Accordingly, what would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a method and system configured to facilitate and confirm simultaneous receipt of certain sensitive information (i.e., electronic documents) by a plurality of intended recipients transmitted via a Web server over a “push” and/or a “pull” network, such as the Internet.
Financial traders and analysts may scan a press release for a single statement, such as a current earnings statement, and take an action based on a numeric value or other statement contained in the earnings statement. This value may be compared to an expected target value. This comparison effectively creates a condition upon which the trader or analyst takes a particular action. This action is usually related to the stock market, such as buying or selling a stock, but may include other actions such as calling someone on the telephone or making a notation of the company name for future research.
As used herein, an “action markup” is defined as placement of action message(s) (e.g., buy/sell/hold) directly into a document for a recipient to act upon. The inclusion of an action message(s) is intended to reduce the reaction time of a recipient needed to perform a certain task. Action markup is not strictly limited to the insertion of simple action messages, but may include computer implemented calculations and/or decision making to produce action(s) based on one or more user settable conditions.
It would be desirable for a recipient to simply receive the value of interest, or better, for the recipient to receive a specific instruction at press release time. Unfortunately, current instruction delivery methods known in the art do not comply with “Reg. FD.” For instance, if one recipient receives an entire earnings release, and a second recipient receives only an instruction, such as the word “sell,” the first recipient may need to wait for the entire earnings release to download, and is therefore at a severe disadvantage. The time it takes the first recipient to download the entire earnings release and scan for the value of interest before making a decision permits the second recipient to have a greater opportunity to take an action before the first recipient.
A variation of the concept of “action markup” is “editorial markup.” An “editorial markup” is similar to an “action markup” wherein, instead of receiving an instruction to take an action, the recipient may receive editorial information/messages, such as an editor's opinion or facts about the impactful content, including insight into other relevant information. Herein we refer to either “action markup” or “editorial markup” as “trader markup”.
What would be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a method for providing trader markup within documents to be disclosed substantially simultaneously according to Reg FD.
What would also be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a method and system configured to facilitate and confirm simultaneous receipt of certain sensitive information (i.e., electronic documents) by a plurality of intended recipients transmitted via a Web server over a “push” and/or a “pull” network, wherein the documents transmitted are in binary (non-ascii) formats.
Web servers may host Web pages with press release content as part of “Notify and Access.” As used herein, Notify and Access refers to the practice of employing a press release service to transmit to Web browsers associated with press release subscribers a URL or hyperlink that links to press release content, rather than transmitting the entire press release content over the press release service to the press release subscribers. Notify and Access notifies the press release subscribers that a press release is available on a Web page of a remote Web server, and through the press release, subscribers may then access the Web page and the press release through their Web browser.
A deficiency of currently employed Notify and Access services is that a Web server displaying a Web page with a press release may be unaware of when a notification has been sent to recipients, and consequently the Web server may make the Web page available before the notification is sent over the press release service. In such circumstances, automated Web crawling software or manual Web browser requests may be employed to view the Web page unfairly before press release subscribers have been notified that the press release (document) is available.
As a result, what would also be desirable, but has not yet been provided, is a method and system configured to facilitate and confirm simultaneous receipt of certain sensitive information (i.e., electronic documents) by a plurality of intended recipients transmitted via a Web server, or multiple Web servers in a Web server farm, over a “push” and/or a “pull” network, wherein the Web server posts the sensitive information (e.g., a press release) on at least one Web pages substantially simultaneously and wherein intended recipients substantially simultaneously receive a notification that the at least one Web page is available for viewing.